“This Container Transports a Disease Which Has No Cure” by Taylor Rae

It only makes sense to kill the boy.

The soldier reminds himself of that fact, over and over, as the armored transport van slices through the windless night. If you came upon it on that lonely highway to the Company’s capital, you would have seen a white van with these words printed on the back:

THIS CONTAINER TRANSPORTS A DISEASE WHICH HAS NO CURE.

Two benches run along the sides of the van. The soldier waits opposite the prisoner, who sits motionless, hooded in a steel mask. The prisoner looks so small, it could almost pass for a human child.

The prisoner’s name is ancient, unspeakable. The soldier’s only identification is his number: Citizen 421-335-14. But in secret places—in the soft-dark of his own bed, in his mind, in his dreams—the soldier calls himself Fourteen.

Fourteen wears the thickest armor the Company can provide. A photonic machine gun rests on his thigh, the amber cartridge candle-glowing in the dim van. If the boy makes one wrong move, Fourteen has clear orders.

Shoot to kill. Don’t hesitate.

There’s a twinge in the soldier’s mind, almost like guilt, but he silences it with the steady forward march of facts. Facts are comforting. Absolute. Facts cannot snakeshift in another mind to become something else, something other. The Company supplies the boundaries of Truth like it always has, as constant as any other necessity in Fourteen’s life: food, water, shelter.

Fact: the boy is not a boy at all, but a predator playing prey.

Fact: it is the old world beast that whispered wickedness in the heart of every warlord who once dreamed of burning nations.

Fact: the unnameable sickness in Fourteen’s gut is another one of the monster’s tricks.

Fourteen spreads those facts out on the flat palm of his mind. The only sounds are the van’s engine and the soft whistle of the boy’s breathing through the mask.

The prisoner is chained to the bench across from him. Its head is hidden behind a featureless, steel-reinforced mask. A leather straightjacket pinions its arms to its chest. Quantum cuffs loop around its neck, its middle, its ankles. The cuffs trap it like a frozen electron, ever-spinning, forever unmoving.

As Fourteen’s captain said, they are meant to avoid “shapeshifting fuckery.”

Only its hands are left exposed. The boy’s fingers are thin and brown, the nails like tiny moons. They remind Fourteen of his own son’s hands, still small enough for Fourteen to cover them with a single kiss.

Fourteen is watching those thin hands when the fingers start twitching, moving. He hackles and grips his gun tighter, rehearsing the movement in his head.

Lift, aim, fire.

But the finger-tapping is careful and patterned. Like Morse code, but the logic is rote repetition, the communication … nothing, but somehow something. Just a relentless duh-da-duh-da-duh. A pattern with no meaning but obvious intent.

Fourteen knows he should say nothing. He was only put in this van as a safe bet – another knife-cold fact. He is competent enough to stop the monster if it attacks, but replaceable enough that the Company can go on living as if he never existed. His death would be noble but statistically unremarkable. There is no twinge in Fourteen’s heart when he considers this. The Company’s choices are always equitable, unbiased, bounded in pure fact. No hard feelings.

His captain’s face appears in his mind, her stare photon-hot. I wouldn’t put you there if I didn’t trust you. Don’t get yourself killed.

Fourteen says, “Hey. Cut that out.”

The prisoner says something behind the mask, but it comes out muffled, incomprehensible. Its fingers keep tap-tapping. Its hands strain against the folds of the straightjacket.

The unease in Fourteen’s stomach churns. Ever since he was a boy, he heard warnings of this monster. Every good Company citizen grows up learning to hate and fear it: the chaos, the scourge, the void that devoured the world all those years ago before the Company brought true order. Its name is cursed to speak or even think, but Fourteen hears it echo through the back of his mind, as if the boy can creep between the atoms of his skull to hiss, I am the monster called Imagination.

Fact: Imagination only exists to create hate and disparity.

Fact: without the Company, Imagination would infect and kill us all.

The van judders over a pothole, and Fourteen’s heart leaps for his throat. He lifts his plasma rifle, half-expecting the monster to splinter its bonds, surge up from the bench, and reveal its true form. There is another van following them, filled with nameless numbered soldiers, just like Fourteen. If Imagination manages to kill him, they will rush in to trap the beast once more.

But the chains do not snap. The boy just keeps tapping and making that noise behind its mask. It is a low, constant hum with a lilting up-and-down pattern. It is a fossil from the old days of poetry and spells and curses – dark arts for dead days.

Fourteen stands up, gripping the railing overhead.

The boy is so small. Nine or ten, maybe. His son is only an infant, but Fourteen’s heart softens as he thinks of his boy sitting there. His own son, chained and trapped and terrified.

No. That’s the beast working into his mind. That’s the beast trying to force him to imagine.

He raps the side of Imagination’s steel mask. “I said stop it.”

But this close, he can hear Imagination’s voice. It is not words but a stranger sound, all ebb and flow.

Fourteen casts an uncertain glance around the van. There are no cameras, no windows. Only the monster and him.

Fact: what he does next is stupid.

Fact: the monster is an affront to the Company’s labor, and it deserves to learn its lesson.

Fourteen aims his gun with his right hand and undoes the locks on the steel mask with his other. He intends to slap the little bastard around, shut it up the rest of the drive. He lifts the mask until he can see the boy’s face: dark brown, almost the same color as Fourteen’s own, his eyes and mouth covered.

But even behind his gag, he makes that relentless noise.

Somehow, it sounds… happy.

There is no fact in that, but there is an impossible truth that ripples fear down Fourteen’s spine. And something more dangerous still: the tiniest sliver of curiosity.

“What’s that sound?” he demands.

They say Imagination’s voice can poison the minds of a thousand men with a single whisper. But Fourteen is a Company man, and he will not let Imagination see him afraid. He has too many walls around his mind to let the monster in.

Fourteen lowers the creature’s gag.

“Your people invented it, the same way you invented me.” It flashes a white-toothed smile. “It’s music.”

Fourteen hackles. He learned about Imagination’s artifices the way Old World children once heard about demons and false gods. At its best, it was unproductive and wasteful. At its worst, it invented tribalism and war and genocide. Only the Company could save anyone from reliving the past.

“You don’t get it,” Fourteen says. “You’ve lost.”

Imagination seems to appraise him through its blindfold. “There are no winners and losers. Just you, living and dying. And me, watching it.” Its voice is so very human. The high voice of a boy who still tumbles and plays and dreams. Nothing like a monster at all.

Fact: Imagination is a master of making lies sound like truth.

Fourteen scoffs. “Your mind tricks won’t work on us.”

There is comfort in that us. Even as he stands alone in this van, the Company stands with him.

Imagination says, “Do you remember being a child?”

Anger furrows Fourteen’s brows, but he flattens his face again.

“I’m not playing your games. I just want you to shut up.”

It keeps smiling that smug, insufferable smile. “The adults said what you’ll tell your own son in two years: Imagination creates disorder. Disorder creates chaos. You used to hide deep in the woods behind your house so no one would hear the games you played. The stories you told. We’re all born with the instinct for story.”

Fourteen clutches the mask, but he’s frozen, throat tight with fury. The monster is in his mind, tasting his thoughts.

Fact: no one is immune to Imagination’s spell.

Fact: he does remember. He remembers his mother screaming at him when she caught him spinning up some pretend-play game with makeshift toy soldiers. That was the first time he heard Imagination’s name, full of spite and spittle: Do you want Imagination to infect you? Do you?

Fact: there is a dangerous whisper in his heart that wants to know what Imagination will say next.

A forbidden image bubbles through his mind. An imagining: his own son’s face, years into the future, twisted in horror and guilt as Fourteen roars the same warning.

The van rumbles on.

Fourteen whispers, “How do you know that?”

“I was there.”

For the first time in decades, Fourteen wonders. It lasts for a glimmering wicked second: if he took off the blindfold, would he see that little boy who buried his stories in the woods and left them there?

Fourteen shakes his head. “Just stop the fucking music.”

He gags Imagination and clasps the mask over its head. But as he moves, he sees a familiar scar on Imagination’s right hand. On Fourteen’s own hand, it is a pale, star-shaped keloid, a forever-memory from his childhood, that day he fell in the woods and a sharp stone gouged his skin. He lied to his mother, just so she wouldn’t know he went back in the woods. Imagination has the same scar, but it is freshly scabbed, as if that day had not been thirty years ago, but only yesterday.

Fourteen sinks back onto the bench, his thumb rubbing circles around his scar. He hears nothing from Imagination for the rest of the shuddering drive to the Company’s capital city, Unity. The concrete, identical skyscrapers are brutal soldiers, phalanxed against the dawn. When armed soldiers march Imagination from the van into the Justice building, Fourteen just turns away and walks to his car, one of hundreds of identical grey battery-eaters in the city.

Fact: he does not know what is fact anymore.

Fourteen drives home, listening to the excited chatter of the Company talk radio. When he arrives, most of the neighborhood is at his house for the ceremony. He had been smugly anticipating watching his neighbor Thirty-Six silently die of envy for weeks now. But with all this noise, with the scent of barbecue and beer, Fourteen has the dumb animal urge to run from here, run right up to the platform and rip its mask off and roar in his own face, You don’t know anything about me.

He shakes hands and smiles and agrees how happy he is. His wife finds him, their son in her arms. He kisses her and hopes she can’t see his shame.

“You’re just in time,” she says. “It’s almost starting.”

Fourteen looks past her to the crowded living room. On TV, the masked boy is chained to a massive concrete platform, surrounded by Company soldiers in robotlike protective armor. Imagination’s fingers tap against its outer thigh.

“Good,” he says.

He stands and watches. He cheers when that little body goes limp, and the heat on Thirty-Six’s face does give him a cold satisfaction. At dinner, the conversation turns excitedly to tomorrow’s gains for Company stocks.

Later, as he and his wife wash dishes, he feels foolish for being so worried. He’s a Company man. He’s logical, fact-driven, immune.

His wife hands him a dish. “Honey, just because you’re a national hero doesn’t mean the dishes are going to dry themselves.”

Fourteen picks up a dish and smiles around their beautiful grey kitchen. One day, he will sit in this kitchen and tell his children how much their father did for the Company. It’s a fact, of course; even if it hasn’t happened yet, it’s as real and inevitable as gravity.

Yes. He can almost imagine it now.

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Taylor Rae is a professional mountain troll, hidden away in the wilds of north Idaho. She does most of her writing in a refurbished chicken coop, surrounded by cats. Her work appears in Flash Fiction Online, PseudoPod, and Fit for the Gods from Vintage Books. More at www.mostlytaylor.com.